Pain Is Only Bone Deep
by rex1011amit
Summary: Baiken knows it isn't going to be a good day the second she gets a look at the date. WARNING: Gory and bloody. (nobody actually dies but yeah)


Baiken knows it isn't going to be a good day the second she gets a look at the date.

Generally speaking, she doesn't really keep track of the date, when she counts days and weeks it is only when something time sensitive is at play. When something _has_ to happen within a certain time frame she keeps count, one day, and then another, and another.

She does this because she knows if she keeps a closer eye on the calendar, all she'll be able to do is count _down._ Count down the days and weeks and months until _that_ day comes around again, and that will be the only day that matters.

She can't have that day matter, so she makes sure that _no day at all_ matters.

As the years went by, she managed to wrangle this retched habit of hers to the point where she can think of _other_ days when she catches sight of a calendar. Sometimes she remembers that a birthday is coming up, or that a holiday in a country she is in is winding down, that sort of thing.

But today is not that, not at all, today is a singular thing, a black hole in the center of her being that opens up once a year and drags her in and grinds down all that she is and all that she built of herself to nothing.

The day everything she ever know, everything she ever cared for, went up in smoke before having it's ashes sink to the bottom of the ocean.

She sees it when she wakes up, it's the first thing to come to focus as she rubs the sleep from her eye and lazily drags her sight across the room when she notices that it is empty. A fleeting thing at first, but a second later she goes completely still and drags her eye back to it, a deceptively innocent pair of glowing green numbers on a digital display.

Her heart thunders in her ears, her skin goes cold and her bones lock in place, refusing to let her look away as the memories come flooding in, her lungs burn in her chest as she doesn't even move to breathe, only dragging her left arm to place a white knuckled grip on the stump of her right.

Pain, a burning, loud pain rushes through where her right elbow _should_ be, then travels down to her fingers before digging back into her palm.

Her fingers break the skin on her stump, a quick and cold needle of focus runs through her and she can breathe and, more importantly, look away.

She turns her whole body away from the calendar, her breathing going heavy and fast through clenched teeth. She looks down at her left hand, sees specks of red under the nails of her index and ring fingers. She looks aside at the stump, sees a sharp, thin line of crimson flowing down from two tiny puncture wounds where she gripped it.

"Shit…" She mutters to herself in a daze, wiping the blood from her hand on the futon as she stands on unsteady legs, "get a fucking hold of yourself…" she hisses viciously, gnashing teeth as she goes to the closet to pull out a kimono and dresses herself in a mechanical fashion.

She bites her tongue as she pulls the kimono over her right shoulder, feeling the cloth ghost over the tiny wounds she inflicted. She nearly strangles herself on the hisses she chokes back as she finishes putting the kimono on.

She walks through the halls in a haze, feels her gut roll and gurgle as she uses her hand on the walls to keep herself steady. "Anji…" She mutters harshly, stumbling once and taking a sharp breath through her nose, "gotta-_fuck-_gotta find him…" She grips her forehead, leaning her shoulder against the wall as her breath hastens and grows labored.

_The world burns around her, the wreckage of her home and family lay on top of her in ruins, crushing her lungs and grinding her bones. The boiling air curls over her skin, the ash of her village stings her eyes…eye? She-She can't-_

_"Shit! Everything's on-hey!"_

_She can only look up, up into the moonlit sky as she hears hurried footsteps and panicking voices grow ever near to her. She wonders why her parents aren't helping her up. It hurts. Everything hurts. Why-why can't she-_

_"What are you __**doing?**__ Why aren't you running?!" _

_Pain, pain from her head, her legs, her arms, her face. No matter where she turns her attention all she finds is pain. Blinding, debilitating pain. Only the sky is painless, and the moon's light offers no comfort. She __**can't-**_

_"There's-shit-there's someone over-"_

_The voices are muffled, as if through both a wall and underwater, but she hears them. She wants to cry, wants to scream, tell them she needs help. That her __**parents**__ need help. But the pain fills her to the brim, pushing against the walls that contain it and refuses to let anything else out or in. _

_"Holy shit it's a __**kid-"**_

_**She can't feel her-**_

Baiken's fist slams a crater in the wooden wall, the shock racing back up her arm jarred her teeth and made a growl roll off her tongue, "_**no."**_ She straightens herself with a stomp of her foot and continues walking, trying to remember where she could find her partner in this-this-

"_Fuck_ yesterday was a shitshow…" Baiken rubbed her eyes, trying to recall where she actually _was_. The day before had them barely walk away from a crack at a Gear nest. The last thing she can remember with any clarity was finding a town and dragging herself and Anji to the steps of an inn.

They must have been both out cold by the time they got a room, otherwise that calendar would have been crushed and thrown out by one of them. Anji had the same aversion to keeping track of time as she did, but she hadn't yet seen his reaction to _today_ specifically, and that granted her an extra sense of _hurry the hell up_ that had her clenching her teeth and forcing down bile from the back of her throat.

"E-excuse me?" Baiken whipped her head up in surprise, her feet somehow getting her to the receptionist's desk fast then she expected, the small, mousey girl shaking behind her glasses at the samurai, "c-can I help you?"

"The man I was with." Baiken groused impatiently, the side of her fist pulsing with pain from hitting the wall. She clenched and unclenched it to attempt to work through it. "Did you see him pass through here? Or leave?"

"Oh! Right!" The girl went through some papers under her desk before going over a list of names, "Mr.…Mito, right?" Baiken nodded shortly, feeling a pin slowly pierce her skull as she ground her teeth, "r-right, well I, um, I didn't see him leave the inn, or near here, so maybe he's…uh…" Baiken saw the girl cower away from her slightly, and made an effort of unclenching her jaw. "…the dining room maybe? Breakfast ends in about half an hour so…?"

Baiken made an about face and started marching, "thanks." The grumble trailed behind her as she felt her heart thumping again, taking a deep breath and closing her eye to concentrate, concentrate on finding Anji and-

"Miss!" The girl shouted of a sudden, voice tight with concern as she walked from behind her desk, "your hand!" Baiken stopped dead, looking down at her still aching fist, a few trails of red leaking from between her knuckles.

_Pieces of the house start to move, she can move the fingers of her left hand, but every twitch sends a flash of pain up her shoulder before digging into the back of her neck. Her home leaves one piece at a time, some measure of the pain leaving with each piece the voice takes away._

_"The whole house fell on top of her_ _man, just leave her we can't-"_

_Enough pain has left her to let terror have its place. It roots itself in the bottom of her stomach, and it helps her turn her eye to look at some blurry shadow at the corner of her vision. Again, the need to scream and cry nearly overwhelms her, and yet her throat refuses to unseal, the pressure building up behind her nose and between her eyes. _

_"She's __**alive,**__ asshole! Look! Twitching and blinking! Help me damn it!"_

_Another shadow joins the first, and more and more weight leaves her tattered frame. The pain crawls through her in waves; one wave makes her clench her teeth nearly hard enough to crack, another makes her shut her eye (why one eye why one eye __**why one**__), and another makes her close the fingers of her left hand into a tight fist. It was like her soul was being yanked out by inches. She's scared. She can't die here. She __**can't.**_

_"Fucking-__**fine-**__world's ending and you run off to-oh __**fuck**__-"_

_One more wave of pain crawls forward, going through her right shoulder…and stops. She thinks for a moment, and swears she can feel her fingers move through static. Somehow, dragging herself through the pain, she manages to move her sight to look at her right side. She is met with the moonlight glinting off the blood pouring out the mangled pile of flesh that was an arm. _

_"Shit! Her arm is…holy shit is that-"_

_**Bone. Moon light white between the shimmering red of her blood, cracked and splintered and sticking out of torn flesh as flowers in a field. A scream rises in her throat, and then joins the chorus of fire filling the air around her.**_

_"_You're _bleeding_!" The girl says, afraid, stressing her words as if she had to repeat herself, before she gathers a few inches of courage to reach out towards the bloodied fist, "I can get you some help-"

Baiken whirls to face the girl, teeth bared in a snarl and shooting out her red stained hand to fist in the receptionist's uniform and hold her an inch off the ground and nose to nose with the samurai, "Don't," She growls, voice rough and low, "_**touch me."**_

The girl nods her head franticly, keeping her hands up and away from Baiken as she's held by the collar, face stricken with fear and eyes wet with unshed tears of panic.

Baiken sees an echo of something in that face, a reflection she saw in a shard of glass that she thought she forgot, and bile rises in her throat as she recognizes it. She clicks her tongue in distaste before tossing the girl back on her feet, turning away from the sound of her scrambling back behind her desk.

A whimper reaches her ears, and she has to bite her tongue to keep from turning back.

She stomps her way across the inn in a blur, slamming open doors and whipping her head this way and that to try and catch sight of Anji, but he evades her. Her failure to find him strains something between her lungs and has her mind tie itself in knots.

She's known him for overreacting, for hiding his emotions, for _lying_, and every time she tries to imagine how he's handled the memory of today she hits a brick wall. She almost doesn't want to imagine it; her own reaction is making her sick to her stomach. It's been a century already, and still the blade in her heart feels sharp.

She's the one who chokes on her emotions, he's the one who wears them like decorations. If she found out he did something _stupid_ she'll drag back by the hair.

She looks down at her still bleeding hand, and ice spreads through her veins. Starting at her finger tips, racing to her wrist, up her elbow, weighing down the back of her neck, before she feels it sinking down her right side.

She feels fingers twitch and clench, a shade of a sensation over a hundred years old. It takes every inch of strength she has not to vomit in the hallway.

_"Hold her down-"_

She hits the wall again, hard enough to nearly open a hole in the concrete. She swears she can hear something break. "Anji Mito!" She shouts, at her wit's end, voice rough and hoarse, "where the _hell_ are you!?"

_"We need to act fast, if we don't she'll just bleed out-"_

_**"NO!" **_She yells out, her voice bounding off the walls and hitting the back of her head. She is _not_ going to sink down that rabbit hole again, not this year. She's going to power through today even if she has too pull her hair out and gnash her teeth till they fucking _break_. "_Anji!"_

(She's not panicking, she's _not._)

_"Come on kid! You'll die if we don't-"_

(_She's not.)_

_"I-I'm so sorr-"_

_(She's __**not.**__)_

"Baiken!"

She's almost ashamed of how relieved she is at the sound of his voice, she hides it by scowling at him as she turns around, "where the _hell_ have you been?" She looks up to meet his eyes as he runs towards her, "you can't just vanish like-" She stops cold when she catches sight of him, her mind sweeping over everything _wrong,_ "Anji, you…shit."

Red rimmed eyes, clothes in slight disarray, face pale, whatever anger she tried to gather earlier fades and she's there, alone with him in the hallway. He manages a short once over of her himself and a fragile smile tilts his lips. "I'm going to guess this morning hasn't been kind to you either?"

She opens her mouth, almost on reflex, to say that she's fine, or that he should mind his own business, but a throb of pain from her probably broken fingers and the wound she made on her shoulder kills the denial at the base of her throat and leaves her jaw hanging with nothing else to say.

She looks down at her feet, her hand clenched at her side and mouth twisted in a scowl. She shouldn't look like this, this pathetic, this weak, this _sad_. Not ever. Not in front of _him._

She feels a gentle hand on her shoulder, Anji somehow avoids touching the wound, and she looks back up to see him with a smile, as if trying to comfort her. But the smile is wrong, the edges are uneven, it doesn't reach his eyes. He shouldn't look this sad either.

"I think we need to leave." Anji says finally, heaving a short sigh and taking his hand off her shoulder. The spot where he was touching her feels cold. "This probably isn't a conversation that we should be having in front of other people."

Baiken looks over his shoulder, and behind herself, to see various other tenants poking their heads over the corner or from behind their doors and nods with a grumble. "Good point." She scoffs, "made a fucking spectacle of myself…"

"Well…" Anji laughs mirthlessly, "that and the owner sort of wants to throw us out after what you did to the receptionist."

Baiken groans and grabs her head but otherwise says nothing. She's sick of today, sick of what she's doing because of it, she'd had enough, she wants tomorrow to show up so the two of them can just…move on already.

Anji puts an arm over her shoulder (still somehow avoiding the wound) and leads her outside.

* * *

"When did you find this place anyway?"

"Just this morning, I thought the both of us could do with a little…isolation, just to get our thoughts in order."

Baiken rests her head on the tree she and Anji are leaning against, looking to her side and down the hill it's planted on. She sees the city in the distance, the morning rush of people working in full swing. "What thoughts?" She grumbles stubbornly, "we're just having a shitty morning, that's it."

"Baiken." Anji sighs, frustration floating in the air between them, "of all the days to be closed off, this isn't one of them." He shuffles over to press his shoulders to hers as they sit, wringing his fingers as he looks at her from the corner of his eye, "this is hardly the first time we've had to deal with…memories coming up when they're not wanted, today is just especially-"

"Don't start." She glares at him, baring her teeth, "I've had a damn _century_ to deal with those damn _memories_, I just clench my teeth and power through." She looks away, glaring at some distant point beyond the horizon. "Today doesn't matter." She bites her lower lip, "it _can't_ matter…"

A heavy curtain of silence falls on them, the both of them stuck in a mist and trying not to breath too deeply lest they choke on it. Baiken feels her head throb, her shoulder ache, her fingers pulsing with pain. She looks at the sky and hopes tomorrow comes before she comes undone by it all.

She hears a shuffling sound beside her, and turns to see Anji remove his head-guard and his glasses. He rubs the bridge of his nose before sighing and looking at her with a sad smile. "Hey," he starts, quietly, before raising his hand to lift his bangs to uncover his forehead. A bright mark of an impact comes to view, a scar as old as the gash that took her eye, "did I ever tell you how I got this one?"

Anji and Baiken tended not to linger on scars, especially not old ones, but every now and again they would drink enough and swap stories about some of them. The obvious ones never came up, but she had caught sight of the one he was showing, albeit not very often. "…I can make a guess where and _when._"

Anji chuckled humorlessly, "that would be a no then." He made himself more comfortable on the tree trunk, his eyes roaming over clouds in the distance as he started to mutter, "let's see…"

"Anji," Baiken spoke up, apprehensive, today was depressing enough already, "you don't need to-"

"I grew up in an orphanage, I told you about that right?" He waits for her to sigh and lean back on the trunk with a weary nod, "right, well, I didn't tell about who _ran_ the orphanage." He shakes his head with a chuckle, "she was this…_rancid_ old crone that managed the place like a boot camp." He rests his chin in his hand with a mild scowl as he reminisces, "you followed her rules, you did as you were told, and you didn't cause trouble. If you _did_ she would yell at you till she was blue in the face and sent you to bed without supper."

Baiken clicked her tongue, "bitch."

"No kidding." Anji mumbled before shaking his head, "she did all that with no real…malice though." He sighed, "looking back, I figure she didn't really hate any of the kids she had to take care of, I think she just felt…stuck in her life." He paused for a moment, "not that it excuses her I suppose, or that a kid could tell the difference." He hummed deep in his throat. "I hated her, as intensely as a child could hate anyone, I still remember a few especially bad nights were I wished she would just…"

He didn't continue, some age old shame stopping him. Baiken looked at him with a smile that didn't even attempt to reach her eye, "that she would just drop dead?"

He didn't answer, instead sighing and leaning back on the trunk. "One day I wake up…and the whole orphanage is on fire." Baiken looks away again, a lump in her throat. "People screaming, children running, some of them laying on the ground like rag doll." He takes in a shaky breath, "smoke and ash _everywhere…_I panicked, obviously, and started running myself, looking for the exit."

Baiken notices his hands start shaking before he grabs his knees with another trembling breath.

"Then…I see her, trapped under a burning support beam." His eyes started to glimmer in the early morning sun before he wiped his face. "I ran towards her, I'm not really sure why, but I wanted to save her…to help…to do _something."_ Then he does something very odd, he _laughs_, and not quietly either, a full bore snort and all, "and do you know what she did?"

Baiken leaned a bit away from him at his sudden laugh, not sure what to say.

"She gives me this _look,"_ his face twists into some form of disgust in an attempts to show her what he meant, "I'll never forget it, and _then_ she grabs a piece of burning wood and _throws it at me._" He shakes his head and pokes his scar with quiet grin, "beaned my right here, right over my glasses."

Baiken's jaw hung loose for a moment before a snarl rose from her throat, "_bitch!"_

"Right?" He chuckles with a shake of his head, and then his smile falls, "after that she screams at me, asks me what I think I'm doing…'don't you know a scrawny kid like you can't help anyone? Don't you know that all you can do is run?'…so I ran."

A flock of birds ruffled the leaves of their tree, causing a few to float quietly down around them. Baiken focused on one leaf that landed on the back of her hand, right over the bandages splinting and binding her broken fingers. It was the first thing Anji did once they left the inn, and only now Baiken realized that she didn't thank him for it.

"And I've been running ever since." He sighs again, opens a palm for a leaf to land there, and slowly but gently closes his fingers around it. "When I woke up today, and saw the date…I started smelling smoke." He uncurls his fingers, and lets the wind carry the leaf away, "by the time I came to my senses long enough to stop…_running_, enough time had passed for you to do…" He points to her broken fingers, "…that."

Baiken turned her body away from him, tucking her broken hand out of view, "what do you want from me?" She muttered, her chest heavy and head foggy, "want me to return the favor? Spill my guts and baggage up on this shitty hill so you can, what, feel like we're on equal fucking ground?" She can't grab her sword with her fingers broken like this, so she settles for the next sharpest thing she has to defend herself, "get a fucking grip Anji."

"What good has swallowing up all of this done for you?" He doesn't even flinch, his voice like iron while he doesn't even turn his head from watching the leaves blow on the wind to look at her, "a century later and the wound still hasn't stopped bleeding."

"_Fuck you."_

"You wake with nightmares, see flashes of your past, _brake your bones to stop yourself from thinking about it,_ and you expect me to just shrug my shoulders and let you carry on?" She looks over her shoulder to see him _glaring_ at her, voice tight and even while his gaze burns her, "what kind of fool do you take me for?

She gets to her feet and meets his glare with one of her own, "The kind of fool who doesn't know when to mind his _own damn business!"_ She nearly snarls when he slowly gets up so she has to lean her head back to keep her gaze with his, "how I deal with my demons is, matter of fact, _not your fucking business."_

"The _hell_ it isn't." He hisses back between his teeth, hands clenching at his sides, "when you wake up in the morning and _rampage_ around an inn looking for me in a panic just because you haven't got your shit together and it results in us losing money and getting kicked out, it is _every bit_ my _business."_

"_Fuck you!"_ She nearly screams, whatever meager patience she has grinded down to dust the moment she woke up, "I was _worried_ about you shit head! I thought you were off doing something _stupid!" _Her voice strains and pains her throat, but she doesn't care, "and don't go off acting high and fucking mighty, didn't you just get done telling me you _ran like a bitch_ because _you_ don't have _your_ damn shit together!?" She grabs her head and _growls_ in frustration, so utterly and completely_ done,_ "how was I supposed to react to you just _vanishing_ on me on the anniversary of the day everything went to shit? Make some morning tea? _Fuck that and __**fuck you!**__" _She narrows her eye at him from under her bangs, "I trust you to have my back in a fight, to be able to handle yourself when I'm not looking, if you want _more_ then that than you can just _screw off!"_

_"See!? This is what I'm talking about!" _He yells right back, for all his talk of his own cowardice, Anji has never backed down from her, never, "shout and scream and _curse_ me all you like! The point is that if we spend all this time together, fighting and eating and traveling, we need to _trust each other! Otherwise what are we even __**doing**__ here!?"_ He rubs the bridge of his nose and takes a breath, "that's what I _want_ from you Baiken, for you to _trust me_, trust me not just in a fight, but with _this."_

The samurai clenches her teeth and grips her stump in a white knuckled grip, turning her back on him while her shoulders tremble.

Anji takes another breath, and his voice is calm when he speaks again, "that's all I want Baiken, for you to trust me, with your hopes, your dreams…" His voice lowers but her moves closer, putting a hand over her own where she grips the wound she made in the morning. "…your nightmares, all of it, even what hurts you, _especially_ what hurts you."

Wind blows her hair about her face, she looks at her feet. "…I'm not weak enough for _nightmares,_ Anji_._"

"Oh _bull."_ Anji sighs, "you can keep up this tough, unaffected samurai act around _anyone_ else Baiken, but not me." He walks to be in front of her again, and she can't escape his glare this time, "you and I may not share the same scars, but you and I went through the same hell, on the same day, _at the same damn age."_ Another breath with closed eyes, and when he opens them his gaze is calm and kind, "nightmares don't make you weak…simply human."

She holds his gaze for a long while, the wind between them and the city in the horizon. The sky turns dark as the afternoon ends and she feels the throbbing in her right arm lessen enough that remembering it _isn't there_ is easier to do.

"…pity me and you're _dead."_

"When have I ever-"

_"Promise me Anji."_

He is quiet for a moment, either to think of his answer or to process how she sounded when she demanded (demanded because she doesn't _beg she never begs and never pleads __**never**__) _his promise, and she sees his smile, the smile he gives her when they share tea and would let the morning drift away, "I promise."

She sighs, walking back to the tree and sliding down the trunk to sit on the roots again, Anji soon sitting beside her. She takes a breath, closes her eye, and remembers.

"When Justice attacked, my house fell on top of me. Gouged my eye out, fucked up my arm."

Anji shuffling beside her, waiting.

"…is that what you remember every year?"

She doesn't dare look, or open her eye, not matter what he promised. Instead she keeps her eye closed, and focuses on the itch of the bark on the back of her neck.

"No, what I remember is…these two guys, don't remember how they looked like, digging me out of the wreckage. I remember my blood in the moon light pouring out of my ruined arm…"

Silence, leaves rustling in the wind and getting caught in her hair, she doesn't bother getting them out.

"…and then they take me to a doctor."

* * *

_She remembers going in and out of blissful darkness. Whenever she returned to the world of the waking and the screaming all she could feel was the explosion of pain from her arm. Or at least what was left of it._

_She remembers the two men, gibbering and bickering and __**noisy**__ above her. They wrapped her head and arm in makeshift bandages to try and stem the bleeding. Half of her vision is blocked, but it would make little difference either way. _

_One of the men blurts out that she lost an eye when they think she can't hear them. The same man that keeps trying to convince the other to just leave her there, to bleed and rot and __**die**__ while they run for safety._

_The other man refuses, every time, looks down on her with so much pity in his eyes she nearly pukes. Says they can't leave her behind, she's just a kid, kids shouldn't have to suffer like she is, they have a responsibility._

_She hated them. One man for his callousness and the other for his pity, the worst day of her life and she is saved by a self-righteous idiot and a cruel bastard. In remembering, she wondered what hurt more, her arm or the self-pity._

_The memories before they reach the evacuation camp are foggy, sketchy, parts missing and misplaced. She remembers every second from the moment they walked into a tent with a doctor with absolute, crystal clarity._

_Everything, from the shade of the doctor's hair to the tone of his voice, a century later she can still call to mind every errant twitch on his face as the two men dragged her barely responsive body in his tent._

_She can remember the throng of nurses running around binding broken limbs and tying tourniquets to the seemingly endless waves of screaming patients. And him, standing like a spear in a corpse, unmoving and untouched by the blood covering his cheek and soaking his gloves. _

_She can remember the grim line of his mouth as he looked to the side and saw her arm._

_"Help!" The pitying man cried out, voice high pitched and jarring her fully awake, "please she's hurt! Anyone!"_

_The doctor walked towards them with a purposeful stride, "put her on the table, now." His voice was steely, calm, leaving no space for the two to fumble or get confused. She felt herself getting carried and then laid out on a metal slab, the cold pricking at the edges of her mind and keeping her awake, keeping her aware of the pain radiating from every part of her body. He looks at her with a detached, cold stare, eyes (__**green, like freshly cut grass**__) flitting over every little injury covering her person before they stop somewhere near her head. "Her eye?"_

_"Fucked." The bastard says, tersely, "she had some…glass or some shit in there and we didn't want to try and take it out in case-"_

_"Right." The doctor cuts off quickly, his eyes aiming downwards, "I'll see to that after…the obvious." He reaches over to her arm and lifts the poorly wrapped bandages. His eyes narrow at the sight of the blood and bone and mangled flesh, but he clicks his tongue and shakes his head as he turns away, "hold her down."_

_"Huh?" The idiot says, confused, "what the hell are you-"_

_"Either help or get out of the way so a nurse can." The doctor cuts off harshly, taking off his bloodied gloves to replace them with new ones and putting on a surgical mask. "We need to act fast, if we don't she'll just bleed out and you would have saved her for nothing." He reaches for something on a nearby table, metal glinting moonlight into her eyes as he lifts it up in his grip._

_A bone saw, teeth jagged and gleaming in the artificial light of the tent. He started walking back to her._

_Panic, sharp and loud as a thunder clap tears through her and she, somehow, manages to find some strength to lift her back from the table, trying to get off, to run, get away. She's stopped before she can even fully sit up, the two men grab her by the shoulders and slam her back down._

_"Oh no you don't kid." The bastard mutters between clenched teeth as she struggles, "you die and I would have wasted my time and my life for nothing, keep still."_

_"Come on kid! You'll die if we don't get rid of that arm, there's no saving it!" She makes a __**pathetic**__ sound from the bottom of her throat as she thrashes against the idiot's grip, "I know you're scared-"_

_She hates him, hates them both, she realizes at this moment, hates them more then she thought she could ever possibly hate another human being in her life. He thinks she's __**scared? **__She's about to get an arm sawed off and one of them is pitying her and the other thinks of her as an __**annoyance?**__ She nearly snarls, pain and anger mixing in her addled, terrified mind and painting the world a vivid, blistering red._

_"Enough." _

_All three stop at the sound of the doctor's voice, loud yet calm and impossible to miss, Baiken leans her head up to look at him, heart beating frantically in her chest as more and more blood seeps from her._

_"Dozens of people are dead or dying in this camp, many more will show up before the hour is done and in __**three**__ hours relief forces from the UN will show up to evacuate anyone who can survive the trip from here to South Korea." He laid out the fact nicely and neatly, his eyes firmly directed at her half gaze, face unmoving and grave, "meaning anyone __**wasting my time**__ and who just want to die are welcome to it so I can attend to people I can actually help."_

_Baiken feels her heart slow, her focus sharpens and suddenly the whole tent disappears as the doctor moves closer and leans down so she and him are nose to nose._

_"So, I'm going to ask you a very simple question, child, do you want to live?" _

_She opens her mouth, but her throat is still clogged, and only rasps and whines find a way out._

_"Yes, or no, if no I'll just leave you here to bleed while I get back to my job, but if yes," he offers her a strap of leather with his other hand, "bite on this, and try not to faint." He raises an eyebrow, voice lacking any sympathy or compassion, simply waiting for an answer, "well? Yes, or no?"_

_She stares at him, her heart booming in her ears, the tent soaked in blood and screams as people die around her, as her __**home**__ burns and falls to pieces. She feels something cold crawl up her spine, something heavy and cruel and quiet, she thinks this is despair._

_She remembers, remembers from a sketchy memory of getting dragged here, a shadow in the sky, a beast of metal and fire, a monster rending the clouds as it flew. She knows who to blame, or at least where the blame might start, and the despair turns molten and burns her entirely, from her lungs to her spine._

_New hate, stronger then what she felt for the two who dragged her here, more intense and infinitely more solid roots itself in her mind, pushing out the anger and pain and replacing it with something __**sharp.**_

_She snaps her jaws shut on the leather strap, the doctor barely flinching out of the way in time to keep his fingers. She glares at him with all her might, a growl somehow climbing up her throat as the doctor clicks his tongue and lifts his saw._

_"Hold her by her shoulders, tightly."_

_Again she's braced firmly against the cold metal of the table, and then she feels the teeth of the saw touch her torn flesh near the elbow._

_"I'll try and make this quick."_

_She barely has a second to brace herself before his arm moves, and every inch of her explodes in apocalyptic pain. She nearly folds backwards from her chest flying up in pained shock as she feels how her flesh is torn aside by strips, every movement of the saw stripping away at her arm. She bites the strap in her mouth so hard her jaw begins to ache, muffled screaming barely filtering through. _

_"Almost."_

_She almost doesn't hear him, and then she feels a snag. The saw catches on something, and she knows what it is. The sounds of metal cutting into bone overpower her senses, the shock of the saw vibrates through her entire body, the pain slicing into the marrow and ever louder screams burst from her._

_"A bit more."_

_He speeds up, and she is certain that this can only be hell. Her mind nearly snaps, her soul screams and shivers as the saw cuts deeper, deeper, __**deeper. **__She cries. Sobs. Hot, fat tears roll down her cheeks as the pain seems to never end, every stroke of the saw a moment that stretches into years. _

_Every happy thought she had in her short life falls away, every blessing, every joy and every fond dream she held dear is shredded between the teeth of the bone saw. Only her anger and hate remain, pushing against the terror of this insurmountable pain and she hangs onto them in a death grip._

_She isn't going to die. __**She isn't going to die. She has a monster to kill.**_

_And then, it's over. The doctor withdraws his tool, stepping aside as a nurse leans in to tie the bloody stump. She's dizzy, from blood loss and from the pain and how suddenly it stopped. She can only barely feel the wrapping around her left eye being peeled off. The doctor once more clicking his tongue._

_The world is growing dark around her, but the taste of rusty metal between her teeth keeps her awake, along with the leather strap, still clenched tightly between her teeth. She hears shuffling from her right side, she turns to see the blurry image of the idiot, wringing his fingers and frowning down at her._

_"I-I'm so sorry-"_

_She spits the leather strap at him before he can finish, before his pity fills her stomach and makes her puke, and he bows his head and flinches away into the dark beyond her vision. _

_And so there she was, tired, angry, disgusted, down an arm and an eye. _

_And yet, alive. Only just barely, but alive._

_She sees the doctor put the saw away and shivers, turning her gaze away from the still shining, red stained teeth._

_The last thing she remembers, before this nightmare ends and the event blurs, is seeing a nurse carry her severed arm from the corner of her eye. She takes it to the entrance of the tent, tosses it like it was a piece of garbage, and then turns back with a face as stone solid as the doctor as she goes to continue her work._

_And then, it is dark._

And she is awake.

Awake, and still leaning against the tree on the hill, overlooking the small town where she saw the calendar that started this whole mess. She looks aside at Anji, sees that his face is pale and his lips in a severe line. He looks ahead at the horizon unflinching, his hands fisting the fabric of his pants.

She wipes her cheeks quietly, looks at the setting sun as Anji is, and sighs.

Waits.

Anji takes off his glasses and worries the bridge of his nose between his thumb and index finger, taking a breath and releasing it slowly. And again. And again.

Like that he continued, in and out, in and out.

Soon he put his glasses back on rubbed his forehead and scowled, "that…certainly explains a few things." His voice is neutral, if a bit disturbed, but so far he has done as promised, so she lets him continue, "…like your reactions to our resident Doctor Faust, for instance."

Against her wishes, a snort escapes her throat and into the air. She puts her hand on her forehead with a broken smile, "among other things huh?"

"Among other things." Anji agreed with a quiet nod, he doesn't say anything for a moment more, then he looks at her, visibly working out what to say before he rubs his forehead again and sighs, "hypothetically speaking, if I asked you if you feel better, what would you do?"

She chuckles softly, "cut your fucking head off."

"That's fair." He's quiet again for a quick moment, and then he whispers, "better than having it weigh on your chest at least…better than letting it eat you up from the inside…"

He trails off, and she considers how easy it is for to…breath, how her jaw doesn't clench on its own, how the hole in her gut feels smaller then it was since she woke up, how her head doesn't throb.

How she can't feel her right arm. At all. No pain, no flexing fingers, nothing.

She leans back on the tree. "No, not better. But easier, at the very least."

Anju hums in agreement, and then they simply sit in calm silence, Baiken picking leaves out of her hair and Anji cleaning his glasses as the sun slowly sets before them. Her partner groans as he picks himself up from the ground, "so, now what?"

Baiken sits for a while longer, her gaze lowering and searching for the roof of the inn she ruined in the morning, a sour taste coating her tongue, "first I go to apologize to that receptionist." She can feel Anji gape at the back of her head. "Than…we move on."

Anji blinks at her, she turns to see him a bit at a loss, "…that's it? After all of that? We just…keep moving?"

Baiken thinks for a moment, and shrugs, "what else is there to do?" She looks back at the setting sun, the last dregs of sunlight slowly fading away to dark blue, "can't get my arm back, we spent all day feeling sorry for ourselves…nothing else to do but march forward, and see what we can find on the way."

Anji's mouth gapes a little, but soon he smiles with a sigh, putting his arms in his sleeves and bowing slightly, "after you then, boss."

Baiken clicks her tongue, but starts walking anyway towards the city, the sound of Anji's foot falls following her step for step.

She looks down at her broken, bound fingers. Her mouth twists in dissatisfaction, "Hey Anji?"

"Hmm?"

"Thanks…for the fingers I mean." Silence, save for the sound of their feet shuffling on the ground. "Should have told you earlier, telling you now, so…yeah."

A chuckle, kind and patient and without an ounce of pity, "anytime."

(Somewhere, she knows, a clock is slowly crawling towards midnight. Three hundred and sixty-four days to go, she knows. The same nightmare next year, she knows. Of blood and bone and pity, she knows.

What she doesn't know, is how she'll _handle_ next year, though she figures that, with Mito at her side, it might be a bit…easier next time. At least a little.)


End file.
